Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood Hands-on

Share.

Sonic's hitting the RPG genre, and we get an early look at his progress.

By Craig Harris

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is one of the most anticipated Nintendo DS games of this year. It's the first true role-playing game featuring the SEGA mascots for one, and two…well, it's Bioware's first Nintendo DS project, and after the team's winners like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, you know, we've been really looking forward to this one. SEGA used the Nintendo Media Summit as a platform to give players a short glimpse of what to expect in this upcoming Nintendo DS game. Definitely cool in its early form, but definitely still needs time to cook, too.

Sonic Chronicles is, for lack of a better analogy, SEGA's attempt to create its own Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi for a gaming platform. It's a role-playing game (RPG) that takes place in the Sonic universe, with players controlling Sonic and company in a top-down environment and stylus-exclusive input. Players will explore the environments by using characters specific to certain tasks – jumping, flying and climbing are required in exploration, so you'll need to make sure your team has the appropriate characters to make the leap, or fly, or climb up the sides of cliffs to access different portions of the environment. As players progress through the game, they'll unfold the storyline through dialogue, with each conversation having multiple choices. Choose well when you're talking.

Like Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi, the game introduces an interactive turn-based battle system. When players encounter an enemy, the game will zoom out of its overhead 2D perspective and whoosh into its fully 3D battle engine where players will fight for life. Each attack is selected via the touch screen and a menu system, and many attacks require real-time input from the player. In one attack, for example, we had to tap a circle as it appeared on screen – timing and accuracy counts. In another, we had to tap and hold the stylus on the screen, and then follow the circle as it rotated around. This was one of the tougher motions in the game. The battles were nicely rendered and moved at a pretty decent framerate, but like the chunky overhead perspective engine, it still needs a bit of polish before it really wows us.

Series favorites, like loops, and not-so-favorites, like Amy, appear in the game.

Another Mario & Luigi/Paper Mario element is the ability to upgrade characters. But instead of badges, players instead equip Chao characters collected along the way. Each of the Chaos in the game have their own specific ability that enhances a team member's status, so players will be doing a bit of Chao balancing to really come out on top in some of the battles.

At the very least in this early rendition feels less like a Sonic game and more like an role-playing game that features Sonic characters. It definitely needs a bit more of what makes a Sonic game, namely speed – it's cool to follow a story featuring all the critters from the universe, but we need a bit of blazing speed for it to really work. The game's in-progress cartoon introduction shows off a whole lot of energy, but that intro was placeholder and had yet to get the Sonic Team stamp of approval. It looked great though – very energetic and over-the-top animated, but we can see why Bioware's concerned that the animation might not get the final thumbs up: it didn't have a very Japanese flavor to its look.

Still, the game has a good amount of development time left to go, and high-profile handheld games generally come together at the 11th hour. While our first impressions are less than enthusiastic, we're definitely still anxious to see this one played out as it gets deeper into development.